Their lips may be either drawn in tightly or pouting outwardsĪnother familiar telltale sign of sadness is crying.

The corners of their mouth will be drawn downwards.

The inner corners of their eyebrows will be angled up.

Their eyebrows will lower and pulled closer together.

With that said, there are a few universal signs of the expression, such as: Even the character experiencing the sadness might not understand exactly why they feel that way. Sadness is a difficult emotion to portray because it is often complex and confusing. True happiness is expressed with the eyes, so when a person smiles without showing it in their eyes, it comes across as cold and ingenuine. If you want to show that a character is faking a smile, make sure their eyes don’t match the rest of the expression. However, a smile is an expression that is commonly faked. Even the corners of his mouth seemed to fight against his normally stoic expression, betraying how he really felt.” “His face relaxed, but I could still see the faint outline of wrinkles around his eyes-eyes which seemed to sparkle ever so slightly despite the dullness of the room. Now, a character doesn’t have to have all of those elements in their expression if they are feeling good.

The corners of their mouth move up at a diagonal, widening their mouth.

A defined wrinkle runs from the sides of their nose to the corners of their mouth, known as “smile lines”.

Wrinkles appear at the corners of their eyes.

Here are some of the signs that a character is actually happy: A cold smile can indicate a more sinister nature without you having to work very hard at making them seem that way. Describing HappinessĪ smile is a great way of showing your readers more about the character, so don’t just leave it at “she smiled.” What does her smile look like? Is it warm, authentic, humorless, mocking, or cruel? Is the character amused, nervous, or happy? A smile can mean many things, and it can even foreshadow a character’s hidden traits. If you want more pointers for writing about anger, I have another article you might want to read: Writing a Character with Anger Issues. There’s a lot more to anger than the expression. When someone gets angry, it usually triggers their body to produce adrenaline (the “fight-or-flight” hormone), which can come with a host of bodily side-effects that can give the anger away.

Vertical wrinkles may appear between their eyebrowsĪnger is a powerful emotion, and it affects more than just the face.

Their Jaw would be tense and might jut forward slightly.

The corners of their mouth would point downwards.

Their lips would tighten or curl inwards.

Their eyelids would become squinted or raised (or their eyes may bulge if they are enraged).

Their eyebrows would be lowered and pulled closer together.

Here are some of the telltale signs of anger in a person’s expression:

Anger affects the entire face, so there are many options for writing about how the different features change. Describing Angerĭescribing an angry facial expression is fairly straightforward because it is such a strongly expressed emotion. Now let’s get into the specifics of each expression.

This is based on the technique “show, don’t tell.” If you want to learn more about that, check out Show, Don’t Tell: What it is and How to Write it. Rather than being told how to feel, readers can pick up on the character’s emotions on their own. However, it feels so much more authentic to a reader if they can figure out how a character is feeling based on the descriptions you give about their facial features. So what does this mean for you? When writing about emotions, it can be really tempting to simply say that the character is feeling angry or disgusted, because that’s easy to write. Emotions are expressed innately, and the faces people make when experiencing different emotions are based on natural instinct. Now, we know that there are 7 universal emotions that every single culture in the world expresses in the same way. Ekman ran a social experiment in the late 20th century with the intention of proving Darwin wrong, but he accidentally ended up proving this theory to be correct.

The greater scientific community disagreed with this theory, including Dr. 4 Some Tips for Describing Facial Expressions Describing Different Facial ExpressionsĬharles Darwin was the first person to theorize that some emotions are expressed universally, regardless of a person’s exposure to other cultures.

Faces showing different moods